Dragged in from Facebook

Me, (on Facebook) :  My computer is sick.  Sick.  Sick.  Sick.

If desperation were a cup, mine would be full up to the top and brimming over.

You know how writers go into a quiet room and create stuff and maybe put their feet up and consider plotting over a cup of strong tea. . . .
 

Me.  Not so much.
I just think about the damned nightmare computer.

I will limp it along till January when the deadline and the editor changes will be done.

In January I am going to give serious thought to getting a Mac. I am weary beyond words of every chapter feeling like a sandcastle built below the tideline

Jeannie Lin at Word Wenches

I know it feels as though I will never post again.  I have been dilatory, which is such a lovely word it almost makes dilatory seem a delightful thing to be.

Anyhow.  I am in full frantic-panic mode about The Book Deadline and therefore largely silent.

I will just say we have a lovely interview with the author of Butterfly Sword over at Word Wenches.  Here.  Very interesting, and not just to those of you enthralled by the Tang dynasty.

Is there anyone not enthralled by the Tang dynasty?  So few periods of history are named after fruit-flavored beverages.

Flash-Bang Openings and Others

There's a particular kind of opening -- I think of this as a 'flash-bang' opening.

Chapter One, (or, more often, the Prologue,) is full of Big Exciting WhizzBang Action Stuff . . .

and then the Big Exciting Action is dropped like something that was left too long in the back of the refrigerator . . .

and then you pick up in the next chapter with somebody leaning over a microscope or teaching class at the University.

This is a flash bang opening, here.

In this sort of opening, the author gives us a gunfight or the charge of Fire Demons or the little spaceship trying to outrun the big one, and then he abruptly pulls us outta there

so we can settle down to meet the Major Character and get introduced to the scenery and the backstory and be told what is really going on, which is generally less interesting than Fire Demons,
alas.

Bits o' News

Good news of various types.


First off:
My Lord and Spymaster will be coming out in French.  That's a little surprise for me.  My understanding is that Romances set in England are not so often translated into French.  I am very pleased.

Other good news is
Spymaster's Lady --  you will doubtless remember that the French rights for that were sold some time back --  will be available in May, as Le Maître du Jeu.  (Master of the Game)

This is a popular title. There are half a dozen books with this name, including, interestingly enough, one of John Grisham's books.  I don't live all that far away from Grisham.  And no, I've never run into him that I know of.

Maître is here,   And it's at Amazon.ca here.  It's not at Amazon.fr, so it may not be on sale in France itself.   This is a pity.  I was looking forward to knowledgeable, snarky comments on the historical inaccuracies.

I do not have a cover picture, but doubtless one will appear sometime, somewhere.


Moving along in the good news parade . . . I've finished
the First VERY Rough Draft of JUSTINE. 
It weighs in at 90K words. 

I'm not sure why this particular rough draft is so slight.  The Second Rough Draft should be 100K to 110K which is more typical of my first drafts.

First Rough Draft
90000 / 90000 words. 100% done!

Second Rough Draft
3000 / 110000 words. 3% done!

The Second Rough Draft has got itself shortened a bit because the very first thing I did was throw out one of the first four chapters.  Always a rousing start to a redraft.

And final good news is, I have a copy of the reprint for Spymaster's Lady in my hands.

In person, it is a just lovely.  Beautiful.  The cover is graceful and dignified and impressive.  Just a little sensual.  The print is easy to read.

I got all sniffly, holding it.

Add Cleverness

I hate it when the characters are supposed to do something particularly clever.

I put it in brackets. 
[Adrian and Justine figure this out, being clever] 
And then when I come back I sit and look at it and can't come up with anything.

I am not feeling clever at all.
The garbage disposal has stopped working, which may have something to do with a quantity of activated charcoal getting down into its little innards.  The light bulb on the microwave has broken. I have never had the lightbulb in a microwave stop working.  And the bottled water dispenser beeps at me when the water runs out. So stupid of it.
I know there's no more water.  I push the button -- see -- and nothing comes out.

I am disgusted with civilization.  I am going to get me nine bean poles and a hive for the honey bee and just not possess anything with electrons running through it except possibly the computer. 
Hah!!

I will get next winter's firewood delivered and go stack that and maybe put my spirit on a more even keel.

In other news, I have figured out that I own 80 linear feet of books.

I'm rounding the corner on the last section of the ms. Looks like the Very Rough Draft of JUSTINE is going to fall at 100,000 words. That means I'll be adding much layering and description to the Second Rough Draft.


I go back and forth on liking the plot structure. Right now, I feel ok about it.

I just finished reading Laura Kinsale's Midsummer Moon. 

(Pause to say -- Why did they give Kinsale such dreadfully bland and forgettable titles?  Why?  Why?  Why?  That one should have been titled 'What the Hedgehog Saw' and then I would remember the title and everyone else would too.)

I will not be able to read Kinsale again till I am at a stopping point in JUSTINE because she is so good she makes me want to cry and just stop writing prose and go be a greeter at Walmart or go back in the Foreign Service and get sent to Afghanistan.

The JUSTINE Manuscript

Justine comes along slowly.
Slowly . . . slowly . . . slowly.

I've finished up a big section and I'm moving on to new territory.
Trying to limit the number of characters in the manuscript. 
Trying to simplify this maze of a plot.



I'm about 50K words into the Very Rough Draft.

Fight Scenes

I was thinking about fight scenes. 

I'm not about to write one just in the next week, but I will need one near the end of JUSTINE.
So I am pondering the physical aspects of violence in the back of my mind.

You got yer 'one guy attacks another guy' kinda scenes. 
These do not tend to be fair fights because if you want to 'attack' somebody, you bring a gun and shoot them or you pick up a baseball bat and jump out and hit them over the head.

More work on the galleys

This is @ Ev, Linda and Annie down in the comment trail.  I started a reply to comment and then it just growed.  So I pulled it up here to make a regular post out of it.
I get prolix. This is why I do not tweat.  Or tweet.  Or whatever.

The galleys . . . I think I am a little dyslexic or something. I have never been able to spell and if there are two periods where there should only be one, I literally do not see it.

Trying to fix the galley drives me insane.

Though sanity may be over-rated.

I sit here right now, looking at
(jo checks)
page 335 out of 392 densely-written pages. Yet another page to check line by line by line by line, (This is like getting your teeth cleaned with the little buzzy drill at the dentists ouch ouch ouch,)
all the while getting yelled at by my Internal Editor who says I could have done this or that much better.

The cat walks over the keyboard, gently shedding cat hairs, generously adding random keystrokes.

The dog -- she is my henchdog --(hench comes from OE hengest meaning horse so this is probably not a logical formation but whatthehell, Archie. Toujours gai.) sits and WATCHES me, ready to rise and accompany me on our next foray. (From ME forrai, to plunder.) Having something lie there and be intensely loyal to you is very distracting.

We will not take our usual walk. The big lumberyard where we've been going to do walks had all its building roofs cave in last week under the weight of snow. The irony of an establishment that sells pre-assembled roof trusses for a living having its own roofs fail did not escape me.

And there might be wolves, y'know, coming down from the hills. There might be wolves.


Let me tell you about the storm.

The day before the big snowstorm, in the spirit of longstanding storm-panic tradition, I decided to pick up a spare gallon of milk.

There are two grocery stores in my neck of the woods.

There is the old Food Lion where you can buy chicken necks and slim jims and collard greens and there is the big new shiny Harris Teeter where you can buy wasabi and sushi and there is a choice of four kinds of organic, free-range eggs.

(I do not buy eggs because I have an 'in' with a woman who keeps chickens. I know the name of the particular hen who lays each of the eggs. Some of the eggs are green. I find this weird.)

Anyhow. I went into Harris Teeter and the shelves were . . . eerily empty.

It was like one of those movies where the world is going to end so everybody grabs up their arsenal of automatic weapons and climbs into their RVs, (8 mpg on a highway,) loads up on Little Debbies and Ding Dongs and Classic Coke, and heads out to the wastelands where they will naturally be invisible to the technology of aliens who have just crossed interstellar space.

Nothing on the shelves. No milk, no eggs, no soft drinks, no snack chips, no cheese, no bread, no oranges, no strawberries, no blueberries, and one lone, battered and unappealing melon. No yoghurt.

The clientele is admittedly pretty Yuppie-heavy, but what kind of emergency strips out every brand of yoghurt?

Every shopping cart was in use. I went through the checkout line -- I'd picked up a loaf of raisinbread that had somehow been overlooked since I was there anyway -- and had a nice chat with the lady from the accounting department who had been pressed into service. Apparently, it had been frantic-horde-of-locusts all day.

The bottled water was all gone.

(Hello . . . People. What do you think is going to fall from the sky? Lead shot? Cornmeal?)

So I went across the street to Food Lion where they had milk and tortillas and lettuce, all of which I bought, and then I went home to hunker down, somewhat underprepared for Armegedon, but then, who among us is not?

I worked onward.  Page 120.  Page 185.  Page 236.  Every time I got so disgusted and weary I couldn't look at the galleys for one more minute I went in and made brownies or something else unhealthy. If I have to face the end of the world, I'm not going to do it on yoghurt.

You know how there are background tasks that go on when your computer is working on somethingelsealtogether? You can look at the task manager and see them in realtime, using up 5% of CPU or 8%.

That's how it is with me and the JUSTINE manuscript. All the time I'm proofing galley I'm working on JUSTINE in the background about 5%.

The good news is I changed my mind about how to handle the first lovescene in JUSTINE. I have a roughed-in a first draft of something unambitious in the way of tab A and slot B. But now I think I'm going to do something more risky. (Risky, not risqué. *g*)

If I write it to do everybody justice, I'll be working a good bit beyond my technical competence and my writerly skill and my all-round maturity and I will definitely be out of my comfort zone. I will probably flop badly. But I guess I gotta try.

So that's what I decided while I was snowed in with the galleys.

And the cat.

And the dog.

the photcredit for the supermarket is nsub1 and it's not me locally.  but that's what it all looked like.

Progress on JUSTINE

I'm going to have to get used to calling this manuscript JUSTINE, instead of ADRIAN.

I'm 16,600 words into the first rough draft. 

Maybe this sounds like lots of words.  But not so much.   These are wild, whirling, mostly useless words that are me seeing the story in a blurry way and reporting on it very fast as the film runs by.

Most of the words will never make it into the final manuscript.  What the First Rough Draft mostly does is show the shape of the scenes.

First Rough Draft Progress:

Now I'm also about 4000 words into the 120,000 words that will make up the second draft.

Why I'm setting toe into the second draft . . .

Normally I'd finish Draft One all the way through before I started Draft Two,
but I needed chapters to send in with the book proposal, so I took the first four chapters of the rough draft and polished them up a bit.

Second Draft Progress:


The sun came in through the window this morning, so I thought I'd share with anyone who's clouded over today.

Covers

Covers . . . 
just because I felt like posting covers ...

ETA:  I have moved the covers below the fold so they will not slow the loading of the blog for slow machines.

We begin

My mind goes to a strange place when I begin imagining a new story.

I embark upon JUSTINE.

I push away from the shore and see where the winds take me.

I have a map on board somewhere here. And a compass.

I'll consult them eventually.

I use the minutes when I'm falling asleep to see the story. This is a rich time for imagining, of course, but I don't remember it all.
Good stuff, lost.
Maybe it shows up someday in the writing. I hope so anyway.

In my dreams, I'm keeping a blog. I see the words on the screen. I edit. I write. And there's a story I'm working on in my dream.
So weird.

In something approaching IRL . . .

I'm making the jump from my beloved old computer to a new one. These are two identical machines, so it's like some schizophrenic alter ego that looks the same but doesn't have the defaults set right.

I have a newer version of Internet Explorer.
It annoys me.

Next on the agenda is to move everything from the old machine over to the new machine.
It is as if I were Robinson Crusoe unloading the wreck of the ship before it is finally washed away, salvaging one more barrel of nails. Rescuing one shovel, one coil of rope.

I put this dreadful day off till I was finished with Forbidden.

The old machine -- four or five years old now -- became more and more unreliable. I'd be typing away and some keys would stop working. Sometimes the A and the Z would become inert. Sometimes the shift key. Sometimes the M. One never knew.

So exciting.

And the whole shebang turned off at random intervals, taking all my work down with it.

Like the copyedits I was dealing with
under deadline.

These things are sent to try us.

So now I must get the new machine up to speed
and do the galleys.
And the kitchen floor . . . . . . must eventually be washed.

And I'm starting on JUSTINE.

Copy edits done on MAGGIE (Forbidden Rose)

We're finished.

I say goodbye to Justine and Guillaume LeBreton, (who is William Doyle) and Maggie and Hawker.

Though I'll get back to them in a week or so when I start plotting the JUSTINE manuscript . . . which used to be the ADRIAN manuscript in my head but is now Justine's story.

As to Forbidden Rose and all I wanted to accomplish . . .

it's either in there, or it's not.

This post-copyedit period is when I walk around muttering, "I could have made it really good if I had another month."

I'm probably fooling myself.

Title, title ... I've got a title

We're going to call the MAGGIE story, The Forbidden Rose.

I'm pleased with the title, which I have decided has all kinds of thematic relevance.
Forbidden Rose is set in the same fictive world as Spymaster I and II.

They tell me Forbidden is not going to have scantily clad people on the front.
I don't know whether this is good or bad.
Many folks like the scantily.
But I'm game for anything. It'll be interesting to to see what they'll come up with in the not-so-much-nekkid category.

In other news, I'm doing the first plot layout of Adrian . . .
and working like the devil to fix Forbidden Rose,
(I'm not used to calling it that.)
which still has plotholes you could drop a mack truck through.

But, y'know ...
the fun part of writing, for me, comes when I'm doing the last fixes on a manuscript and making the language just right, or when I'm dreaming up the basic story.

Now I get to do both of these at once.
Yip -- as it were --ee.

Adrian, Grey, Jessamyn . . . look like . . .

Emlyn says ...


And because you mentioned that Annique resembled a young Natasha Kinski, could you put a face on Adrian as well? And Jess as well?

I got Jess tacked down someplace or other as Robin Wright, in The Princess Bride. Further back in the posts a bit there's links to pictures for both Jess and Annique.

Adrian ...


Two artists' rendering.
painted about five years
apart.












This is Sebastian.
Here, .

[Edited to add -- I've pulled out the copyright photo and put in a link to it. Now we are all legal again. ]



And Grey.










.

creative commons Bollywood Sargam

You are a witch, btw. These characters are ALIVE to me.

.

(jo blinks.)

You mean they aren't alive?

.

.

WAAAAHHH!

Adrian's Story

Claire Emerson writes --

Since you brought up Adrian -

What are your latest thoughts on writing him a book of his own? I'm following your deliberations on this with great interest. He's a marvelous creation and I'd love to read more of him, but, like you, I have some difficulty imagining his heroine or HEA.

And, if Adrian's story isn't next (after Doyle/Maggie)... do you know yet what is?


I'm up to my gills in MAGGIE right now. Adrian -- for me -- is twelve. He's dirty and skinny and one of his knees got dislocated a while back. I haven't decided whether it's his left knee or his right. Do you have a preference?

He's not just a bundle of joy to those around him.

Since I'm holding Adrian so firmly in front of me as an angry, dangerous pre-teen, it's difficult to see him as the more complex and thoughtful, (still dangerous,) man he becomes.

When I get to the end of the MAGGIE story, I'll know whether I can visualize Adrian's HEA.
I hope I'm working on it in the back of my head all that time.

I don't know right now if ADRIAN will be the story directly after MAGGIE. There might be one intervening story. But I think the one after that would have to be ADRIAN.